How To Raise The Collective Intelligence Of Teams

When does collaboration become a drag on effectiveness?

Photo by Vasilis Caravitis on Unsplash

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In the most recent installment of How To Use Time, I wrote about True Asynch, adopting the thinking of researchers Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley about ‘burstiness’: where daily communication is constrained into as narrow a timeframe as possible:

Our research suggests that such bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of successful teams. Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas — deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group. Bursts, in turn, help to focus energy, develop ideas, and achieve closure on specific questions, thus enabling team members to move on to the next challenge.

We’d certainly want our teams to be successful, so adopting burstiness — while a big departure from the default behavior at most companies — seems like a good idea.

But I wondered about the connection between the practice of truly asynchronous communication and team success. How does true asynch lead to greater success for teams?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anita Williams Woolley was the lead in another research effort that looked into team effectiveness, and she and her colleagues found that a team’s collective intelligence was influenced quite strongly by the makeup of the group.

Counterintuitively, adding people of higher intelligence to a team does not necessarily lead to higher collective intelligence, measured by teams undertaking diverse cognitive tasks. Collective intelligence is not some arithmetic average of the intelligence of those in the group: it is an emergent property arising from the interactions of the members.

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